HR Hartley

Sitting for lunch at London’s celeb-studded Ivy restaurant for a
presentation by Michael Portillo on the future of work (claiming other people’s
anecdotes as his own), I turned to an HR consultant and began discussing how
good HR people were at sitting around tables discussing HR matters.

More specifically, HR excels at jabbering on about how great it would be if
the rest of the business allowed it to become a strategic entity.

But here’s the hard fact: lounging around debating how unfair the rest of
the company is being to you really won’t do the HR industry any good.

We have to take those nasty bullies on. I mean, you wouldn’t hear a bunch of
finance people around a table worrying about how strategic they are. They’d be
all action – they don’t have the same inferiority complex that we have.